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All Rise...

Appellate Judge Rob Lineberger thinks this horse flop barely clops.

The Charge

A timeless tale of love and courage.

The Case

There isn't much point in beating around the bush: Why would anyone want to
see this movie, unless they are die-hard fans of the Anna Sewell book? It just
isn't entertaining.

For the record, I'm reasonably fond of the Black Beauty milieu. The
1970s television show based on the novel was fun, and I've seen a cheesy
miniseries or two (one on Nickelodeon, if memory serves). I was hoping that this
would be an innocuous, rousing tale that I could watch with my son. What I got
was a lukewarm, rather gruesome, and mostly aimless hodgepodge of uninspired
drudgery.

Black Beauty is rated G, which I gather means it is targeted toward
children. Picture this scene, and tell me if your five-year-old is up for it: A
cruel man whips his horse harder and harder until the horse collapses, breaking
the man's legs. He threatens to murder the horse, but he needn't bother. The
horse is writhing around on the ground in pain. A servant pulls out a pistol,
points it into the horse's forehead, and squeezes the trigger. Cut to a close-up
of an onlooker's horrified face as the echoes of the gunshot ring out. Nice,
huh? The only way it could be worse is if the next scene showed the servants
lugging the horse's hindquarters through the street and chopping them up for
soup, while the local shoemaker hacked off the hooves and boiled them down to
make glue. Though this is the most disturbing scene, it is not the only
adult-minded theme you'll find in Black Beauty. I'm not much of a prude;
my toddler has watched anime and other age-inappropriate stuff. But I actually
shielded his eyes from the screen with my body when the horse execution
occurred.

At least that scene had some emotion to it. The bulk of this film doesn't
concern Black Beauty at all, or Joe (Mark Lester, Oliver!), the passionate young horse owner. This
isn't a very complicated formula; the two most important elements (aside from
adversity) are Joe and Beauty. Yet even that is too much for director James Hill
to muster. In fact, we hardly see them together before Beauty is whisked away to
another owner, who then loses her to another unlikely owner, who then
bequeaths/loses/trades the horse to someone else, and so on. This predictable
cycle makes certain that Beauty will eventually make her way back to Joe, but we
have so little invested in the relationship that the inevitable joyous
reunification scene lacks interest. The events between Joe's losing Beauty and
getting her back are heart-numbingly dull.

I keep talking about the horse, but it isn't really a horse. It is a herd of
vaguely brownish to jet black horses, some thin and some fat. They all have a
ridiculous splotch of white-out on their foreheads, which in movie land means
they are the same horse. Perhaps DVD is not the best vehicle for this movie,
because between the different builds and obviously fake markings, any sense of
verisimilitude is erased. This is an appropriate time to mention the video
transfer, which is relatively clear, relatively saturated, and has decent black
levels. The shadow detail is awful, there is extremely strong grain, and the
luminosity wobbles between different values as though clouds were sweeping
before the sun. Little cleanup has been done. By the same token, the audio is
mostly clear, though it does distort on occasion. The soundtrack is maudlin and
overblown.

Black Beauty is a standard Paramount release, which is to say no
fancy menus, no inserts, and no extras. At least they are charging a reasonable
price for the release, which hasn't always been the case.

We still have time to discuss the sloppy editing, abysmal acting,
cringe-inducing dialogue, and abuse of cliché, but I'd rather end on a
positive note. Eugenie introduced me to the
concept that Maria Rohm is hot, and she has a cameo in Black Beauty. She
doesn't reach the levels of molten hotness that she did in Jess Franco's
exploitation movies, but it is always nice to see her violent eyes and exquisite
face. Fortunately, Black Beauty introduced me to the concept that Uschi
Glas is hot, and for her to revive my attention amid the doldrums of this dreck
is saying something. Attractive, charismatic women go a long way toward
redeeming a film.

Yet the best thing about this film is the live birth of a somewhat blackish
colt. How they got the white-out on its forehead is one of those movie magic
mysteries. The point is that we get to witness an actual horse birth, and it is
pretty cool. Worth buying the DVD for? Well, maybe not.